Solving Large Scale Crew Scheduling Problems by using Iterative Partitioning

This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). We discuss several methods to partition large instances into several smaller ones. These smaller instances are then solved with the commercially available crew scheduling algorithm TURNI. In this paper, we compare several partitioning methods with each other. Moreover, we report some results where we applied different partitioning methods after each other. With this approach, we were able to cut crew costs with 2\% (about 6 million euro per year).

[1]  Dennis Huisman,et al.  Decision support for crew rostering at NS , 2006, Public Transp..

[2]  Matteo Fischetti,et al.  Solution of Large-Scale Railway Crew Planning Problems: the Italian Experience , 1999 .

[3]  Matteo Fischetti,et al.  Crew Scheduling for Netherlands Railways: "destination: customer" , 2000 .

[4]  Sam R. Thangiah,et al.  Computer-aided Scheduling of Public Transport , 2003, J. Sched..

[5]  Anthony Wren,et al.  Experiences with a Flexible Driver Scheduler , 2001 .

[6]  Jacques Desrosiers,et al.  Selected Topics in Column Generation , 2002, Oper. Res..

[7]  Matteo Fischetti,et al.  A Heuristic Algorithm for the Set Covering Problem , 1996, IPCO.

[8]  Dennis Huisman,et al.  Operations Research in passenger railway transportation , 2005 .

[9]  Jacques Desrosiers,et al.  Time Constrained Routing and Scheduling , 1992 .

[10]  Martin W. P. Savelsbergh,et al.  Branch-and-Price: Column Generation for Solving Huge Integer Programs , 1998, Oper. Res..

[11]  M. V. Riel,et al.  Crew Scheduling for Netherlands Railways “ Destination : Customer ” , 2000 .

[12]  S.,et al.  An Efficient Heuristic Procedure for Partitioning Graphs , 2022 .

[13]  Leo G. Kroon,et al.  Reinventing Crew Scheduling at Netherlands Railways , 2004, Interfaces.

[14]  M. Padberg,et al.  Solving airline crew scheduling problems by branch-and-cut , 1993 .

[15]  Matteo Fischetti,et al.  A Heuristic Method for the Set Covering Problem , 1999, Oper. Res..

[16]  Dennis Huisman.  A column generation approach to solve the crew re-scheduling problem , 2005 .